Whatever Executed Today has done by way of its daily trade in memorable deaths was done earlier, deeper, and more consequentially by the index of hagiographies that is the Catholic calendar of saints. For every occasion — even Christmas! — the Church knows a selection of faithful culled from the Roman Martyrology who gave their life for Christ just like you should be willing to do, and darned if those folks and the believers who have prayed their intercession didn’t turn an obscure Levantine cult into a world-shaping religious edifice.

Say what you will about the calendar’s shortcomings as journalism — it has numerous made-up dates and historically dubious martyrs — it fantastically achieves its objectives of propaganda and historical memory: the very seasons in their passage day by day as a thread of heroic missionary martyrdom joining believers across place and time and circumstance from the present-day pews all the way back to the right hand of the suffering Savior himself.

We’ve many times here used this or that entry from the calendar. For the next few days, we’ll yield the floor entirely to this monumental ancestor of our little project … for as one great martyr put it, “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.”